Century The Case of World’s Longest Serving Political Prisoners

By Michael Breen

The tall man in the crumpled blue suit and a pink chiffon scarf around his neck walked out of the prison gate. Beside him was a short, stocky man with dark patches around his eyes.

“Thank you for coming to meet us,” the stocky man said to a group of students. “I’m only an old man. There are younger men who should be released because they still have their life to live. I feel guilty in front of them.”

“Grandfather, how long were you in there?” a student shouted out to the man with the pink scarf.

“Thirty-seven years,” he said. The students gasped in disbelief.

This scene, in March 1993, part of a broader amnesty, marked the start of the quiet release of a group of political prisoners unknown to the Korean public but whose incarceration gave the country the dubious honor in the international human rights community of housing the longest-serving prisoners of conscience in the world.

Known as the “non-converted,” these prisoners were jailed on charges of subversion or spying for North Korea and had their terms extended indefinitely for their refusal to change sides.

Another prisoner released that day, a man named Lee Jong-hwan, had served forty-two years.

“It hasn’t sunk in yet that I’ve been released,” he told me a few hours later. “I saw in the papers that they were going to free people who were over 70 years old, but I wasn’t sure if I would be included. Even this morning the guards didn’t let me know. They only told me as they opened the gate. Then I was driven here. I’m not sure if this is still a prison. I’ve been told I can’t go outside the grounds without permission.”

Among those still in prison at that time was Kim Sun-myung, who had been arrested in the same month as Lee, in October, 1951, during the Korean War. He was eventually freed in August, 1995, after almost forty-four years in prison, a world record.

Kim and Lee were both South Korean-born communists. Kim was a private in a reconnaissance unit in the North Korean army when he triggered a booby trap and was captured by American soldiers. Lee was a political operative, picked up by US forces crossing the border into South Korea. Both were sentenced to fifteen years as “collaborators” by a military tribunal. The following year, they were retried as “spies” and sentenced to life.

A relative of another prisoner, Ahn Hak-sop, a southerner who had volunteered in the North Korean army during the war, was later told that if she had arrived before his trial and paid 7,000 won (a little under $9 at current rates), she could have obtained his release. She got there a week after a military court had sentenced him to life imprisonment. That was in 1953.

These men were jailed less than half-way through Syngman Rhee’s term as president. They were kept, for the most part in solitary confinement, through the rule of Rhee, Park Chung-hee, Chun Doo-hwan, Roh Tae-woo and into the administration of Kim Young-sam.

“In the 50s the prisons were not fit for humans, just beasts,” said Kim Sun-myung in an interview in the late 1990s. “There’d be from fifty to a hundred people in a large cell. Many were near starvation. When an inmate died, we tried to put him in a sitting position so he looked alive and after roll-call we got his ration.” For ten years after the 1961 military coup, all visits and letters were banned. It was during this period that the prisoners disappeared from public knowledge.

Their plight brought double misery to their families, both their absence and suspicion on the family. Four years before Kim Sun-myung’s release, I traced his brother who managed an electronics shop in Myeongdong, Seoul. “I went to see him once about twenty years ago, but he was still a crazy Red,” he said. “He brought so much grief to the family. All he had to do was sign the form and he could have been released.”

Kim’s family came under such pressure that, in 1968, his brother decided to register him as having died. Kim Sun-myung’s mother did not know he was still alive until the day of his release in 1995. By then she was in her 90s.

Ideological offenders were given an opportunity to change sides. In a system inherited from the Japanese and adopted by South Korea in 1955, they were able to swear loyalty to South Korea and be pardoned. Kim, Lee and Ahn declined because they saw themselves as prisoners of war.

In 1972, a new policy required inmates to sign two conversion documents, a declaration regretting past activities and an oath of allegiance. Compliance entitled a prisoner to basic privileges and made him eligible for parole and amnesty.

By this time, the numbers of ideological prisoners had increased. Some were captured North Korean agents. Others were anti-government leftists accused of being pro-North Korean.

Refusal required great courage. At first, prisoners were severely beaten. At least seven died under beatings, survivors say. The “refuseniks” were kept from influencing others. Kim Sun-myung spent 35 years in solitary cells.

When these measures failed, more subtle means were used. Wardens brought political scientists to discuss the errors of communism and encourage prisoners to recant their beliefs. Family members were also brought in to pressure them to sign. There were also occasional “educational” day trips to a textile plant near Taejon and for lunch at the Kum River resort run by the Hyundai Group to show how the country was changing.

Conditions began to improve after June 1987, when Korea began to democratize. After prisoners protested by kicking their cell doors, they were permitted to see certain TV programs. From 1988, recorded radio news was broadcast once a day and from 1989, prisoners who received money from their families were allowed to buy one newspaper a day. Books on Marxism are also permitted although political works on North Korean Communism were banned. Guards stopped beating those found secretly communicating with inmates in neighboring cells.

When the story of these forgotten men was revealed in 1990 by two Korean-Japanese prisoners, Suh Sung and his brother Suh Joon-sik, who were freed after an international lobbying campaign, around 70 unconverted prisoners remained. A similar number had converted and were awaiting release. Amnesty International adopted them as prisoners of conscience after research indicated they were not terrorists and had not committed violence.

Once released, the men lived quietly. Some chose and were allowed to return to North Korea. No Nelson Mandela emerged, which begs the question – why did they resist?

They had various reasons. The North Koreans knew that if they converted, their families still in the North risked loss of status or worse punishment. Li In-mo, for example, was a North Korean war correspondent, treated as a guerrilla because he had been captured in 1952 in the mountains with partisans left behind after the communist army retreated. In North Korea, where authorities thought he was dead, his wife had privileges as the widow of a war hero. He was released in 1988 and five years later became the first prisoner allowed to return to Pyongyang where he died in 2007.

Several were dissidents who had falsely confessed under torture to being North Korean spies. They wouldn’t recant because to do so would require them first to admit they were guilty of the crimes for which they had been sentenced.

For Kim Sun-myung, it was a simple matter of principle. He said: “I couldn’t lie. I couldn’t cheat my conscience.”